Anderson’s Miss Havisham started with that weird voice

Gillian Anderson, most famous for that longtime role in sci fi TV series, “The X-Files,” takes on the wonderfully ancient, cobwebby look of literature’s infamous jilted recluse, Miss Havisham, on tonight’s “Great Expectations.”

However, the transformation started, Anderson said, with the peculiar voice.

Miss Havisham’s diction is so crisp here, her speech so without modulation, that you do start imagining she is indeed far from this world — frozen in time, so to speak.

“For whatever reason, when I first read the script, how I saw her in my mind’s eye is how you see her in this production,” Anderson told us recently at a PBS press session. “So upon hearing that voice, the work is then about discovering who that is … that’s just how it works for me … what I hear first in my head and then it kind of moves from there.”

She realizes now, however, that this could have turned out to be a big mistake … if the director didn’t exactly hear the same “voice.”

“Something that I realized only recently, and I’m not sure this is such a good idea now that I’ve come to the realization, which is that after I hear the voice in my head, I don’t actually speak it out loud until I’m in front of the camera,” Anderson said. “I didn’t know that about myself, and it occurs to me that that could be a really big mistake and that in this case, the director Brian could have said, ‘What are you doing?’ and ‘That’s not how I saw her.’

“So I’m not sure whether I’ll do that again. It just (that) once I agree to do something, it just starts to materialize and,” she added, “it’s very heady, it’s not so much of an active thing … it’s like a fungus.”

The result, as viewers who watch this rich two-parter on PBS will discover, was an incredible performance.

However, that’s only one of many gifts delivered by this Masterpiece adaptation of the Dickens classic. The story of orphan boy Pip (Douglas Booth in photo above), who rises from a poor blacksmith’s apprentice to a pampered gentleman thanks to a mysterious benefactor, is full of colorful characters and moving moments.

Another standout is Ray Winstone (right) as the story’s escaped convict, Magwitch, the man who ends up making the most dramatic impression on Pip’s life.

“Great Expectations” begins at 8 tonight on PBS (KLRN) and wraps up at the same time the following Sunday.